Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #7.
Tech
How r/wallstreetbets Pushed Gamestop Shares to the Moon
Brandon Kochkodin at Bloomberg:
Give credit where it’s due. In their frenzy, WSB’s cocky hordes have managed to turn the tables in a game short sellers invented, spinning gold from the complacency of others. Before this year, GameStop was a cash register for bearish traders, who borrowed and sold more shares than the company issued. Hedge funds had been winning so long that they overlooked the tinderbox they were creating should sentiment turn.
Gamestop has of course been the wildest ride of the last week, and for good reason. It’s been truly wild. I strongly recommend taking in Planet Money’s take on the phenomenon.
JS browser security concat bypass not detected
An AC filed a bug against semgrep…
We all protested this but he didn’t agree citing timelines. So during the security audit Semgrep found “raw-html-concat” issues and I was happy that atleast now he will be forced to follow proper standards. But instead he bypassed me and forced the juniors to use concat() instead of string concat. And this was undetected by semgrep.
Funny that semgrep caught the one usage of concat but not the other, and I love this approach to dealing with his management: file a bug to close the loophole that allowed them to do this in the first place.
South African government releases its own browser just to re-enable Flash support
Catalin Cimpanu at ZDNet:
The South African Revenue Service has released this week its own custom web browser for the sole purpose of re-enabling Adobe Flash Player support, rather than port its existing website from using Flash to HTML-based web forms.
This seems like just asking for trouble, really.
Wikipedia Embraces First-of-Its Kind Universal Code of Conduct, Conceived For The New Internet Era
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that administers Wikipedia, launched a first-of-its-kind Universal Code of Conduct that expands on the project’s existing policies to create a global set of community standards for addressing negative behavior on the site.
1500 contributors to the final product. Wow.
PostgreSQL on ARM-based AWS EC2 Instances: Is It Any Good?
The expected growth of ARM processors in data centers has been a hot topic for discussion for quite some time, and we were curious to see how it performs with PostgreSQL.
Spoiler alert: They had some really eye-popping improvements on ARM over x86.
The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
Terence Eden:
If your laptop and phone both got stolen – how easily could you conduct online life through the worst browser you have? If you have to file an insurance claim online – will you get sent a simple HTML form to fill in, or a DOCX which won’t render?
A great read all around.
Thomas Claburn for The Register:
In November 2019, Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the popular core-js library, lost an appeal to overturn an 18-month prison sentence imposed for driving his motorcycle into two pedestrians, killing one of them.
As a result, he’s expected to be unavailable to update core-js, a situation that has project contributors and other developers concerned about the fate of his code library.
It appears that core-js has an astonishingly low bus factor (which, given the details here, feels a bit gross to say out loud).
Grab Bag
If you remember the infamous Time Cube, Ben Pang built a procedurally generated clone that they call the Infinite Gene Ray.
The blue verified badge on your house lets people outside know that you’re an authentic public figure. To receive the blue check crest, there must be someone authentic and notable actively living in the house.
Poe’s Law is dead.